HW Recommendations for DHCP/Router/Firewall

[DumbMSAdmin]

I'm new to the LINUX world and am looking to put up a box to support 100 devices on our network. We're on broadband and need:

DHCP
Router
Firewall\Intrusion detection

Your hardware and software recommendations are greatly appreciated. I would like to go with a mainstream manuf...ie, Dell, Fischer-Price, Hasbrow.

Thanks in advance for the advice

Craig

[mrBen]

I can heartily recommend SmoothWall (http://www.smoothwall.org), a Linux based firewall distribution - will sit on some old hardware (an old PI/PII should do with 64+ memory) and act as a firewall, do DHCP and has a SNORT plugin for intrusion detection. Should save you a few bob compared to a hardware firewall.

[Hayl]

Originally posted by DumbMSAdmin
I'm new to the LINUX world and am looking to put up a box to support 100 devices on our network. We're on broadband and need:

Your hardware recommendations are greatly appreciated.

any older box will be fine. P1 prolly can do it.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

100 devices? :eek:

What type of broadband connection is this? Normally, ISPs frown on NAT, but they normally let it slide for home users. If you're using Cable, ISDN, or any type of DSL, 100 users accessing the resource at once may end up performing like 15 users trying to access a 56k.

You guys might want to consider looking into multiple connections coming in, segmenting the traffic using VLANs on a switch, and having multiple machines doing the routing. If that's not an option, I'd look into FreeBSD for the firewall's host OS. Though it's not as easy to configure as a pre-built firewall distro, you can do things like bandwidth limiting, so a few computers don't slow the connection down for everyone. All things considered, configuring a FreeBSD firewall is pretty straightforward-- there are numerous points of documentation you can reference online.

As for the hardware, Hayl's right, a Pentium class could probably do the job. But, I'd at least make sure I was running at least a 100Mbit NIC connection on the local LAN side, just to ensure availability, and the more memory, the better.. And a network switch, as opposed to a hub, wouldn't hurt either.

[ECartman]

PII...HA. I got a smoothwall running on a an Intel 386 with 18MB RAM and a 700MB HD. That prolly won't work too well for the kinda trafic you are looking at though.